A USB Stick to Eliminate Porn in Workplaces

For just $100, bosses can now detect porn on an employee’s PC with Paraben’s Porn Detection Stick, a USB thumb drive preloaded with porn detection software. The software is able to search a 500 GB hard drive with over 70,000 images in about an hour and a half, flagging images with facial features, flesh tone colors, image backgrounds, body part shapes, and more.

Images are identified by file headers, so the usual file extension changing trick wouldn’t work here. It can even recover deleted images and scan internet activities, fishing up evidence you would otherwise thought had been destroyed.

The Porn Detection Stick maker claims that the software has a very high level of accuracy, with only 1% false positives. But in a more detailed write up by Forbes, commentator goatrope points out:

This product is not really new – I bought it for use at my company about six months ago. And I was not impressed with the results – I received hundreds of false positives. Perhaps I need to re-check the settings, but the “suspect” photographs turned out to be album covers; candid shots from cell phones and lots of pictures from the company picnic and even our web-based newsletter. It was flagging pretty much anything with skin as “suspect” porn.

As a small business owner, I love the concept of The Stick; but I was underwhelmed with its execution.

Whether or not it has high rates of false positives, I could imagine that it wouldn’t work too well in a tech company. It takes a bad IT employee to consume and store porn on a work machine. But it takes a much worse and incompetent IT employee to store porn openly when great encryption tools like TrueCrypt is available for free.